Making referrals work – The 4 key strategies of successful referral management

Every tertiary care hospital understands the importance of IPD patients and leaves no stone unturned to make sure a higher inflow of such patients. This covers the entire gamut of efforts right from recruiting the right specialists to investment in latest equipment to corporate marketing and branding programs to the sales teams fanning out to the nook and corners of the country to showcase the unit’s competencies to private practitioners all over the country and the world (for medical tourism)

However shockingly according to a survey by Archives of Internal Medicine, in 2009 105 million patient visits resulted in a specialist referral, but “only about half of referrals result in a completed appointment. Our analysis shows only 25% of referrals are completed as intended by the sending provider. In essence, over 50% of your efforts going waste.

The purpose of this post is to present the four components of successful referral management, gathered over four years and one million referrals across a range of providers.

Technology can be a huge enabler to stem this loss, not to belittle the importance of implementing referrals within existing workflows, as well as the people involved in creating organizational change.

The 4 key strategies being :

• Integrating referral management into the lead management workflow
• Engaging patients throughout the referral process
• Analyzing referral metrics to improve outcomes
• Keeping key players and influencers engaged

Thus any solution that you are considering should be able to take care of all these aspects for it to be effective in turning around the referral to conversion statistics.

Learn how Medripple’s API based referral management solution can be seamlessly integrated into your existing salesforce or hospital MIS tool, help you in keeping the referring doctor, treating doctor, sales team and the patient updated at every step of the referral, create dashboards on the fly and provide you with a facility to create your special interest groups to keep your influencers engaged.

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